Den nya människan. En handbok om 1900-talets idéhistoria

We depart from the intuitive idea of action –which for us is the same as an “act” both mental and physical– and its opposite the idea of no–action or passivity (stillness, apathy, immobility) to which we have a special term acedia (from late Latin and from the Greek akedeia, meaning “indifference”). András Pöstényi studied Freud’s idea of intentionality and concludes that Freud was strongly influenced by Brentano’s identification of the “psychic” with the “meaningful” which conduce to a breakdown of the psychology that identified the “psychic” with “consciously”. So, after Brentano, Freud could conceive unconscious meaningful psychical acts. Freud concluded that if the representations in a dream were produced randomly they would be caused by a somatic cause and could not be psychic phenomena. According to Freud only psychical phenomena can be interpreted and everything that can be interpreted has to be psychic. The intentional act then, understands by Freud as an “action”. Because the dream is an intentional act, it is something we do and not something that happens to us. Freud give this a name, he called it “eine psychische Aktion”.